Interesting stuff… but isn’t just simply that in a circular path (or unending wave function) we orient ourselves by turning points?
I mean the shortest and longest day of the year are the markers the ancients could notice. The equinox are just the exactly equal day/night 24 hour periods (also noticeable with a sun dial and such).
If the year was 360 days this would be simple. It’s a very divisible number. Magic numbers to the ancients were base 12, 60, and 360… because they have so many factors. If u need to divide things into equal groups, you want to use such numbers… but I digress.
We use these markers because we can observe them… even if only after the fact.
The ancient celts actually observed the seasons in the way Scott mentions - they marked the divisions between the seasons on the dates halfway between the equinox and solstice, Beltane (May 1) as the beginning of summer, and Samhain (October 31) as the beginning of winter.
Agreed. I took an astronomy class that talked about how the ancients "celebrated" the solstices--often including human sacrifices on the winter solstice, as a means to beg the Sun God to stop retreating and return for summer.
My contention is that if heat did not lag light, and thus the summer/winter solstices were the hottest/coldest day of the year, then the middle of summer would be "Midsummer," i.e. the summer solstice in late June, (and likewise for winter in late December), but because heat does lag light, we have adjusted what we call the seasons to begin on what would be halfway through, otherwise.
And like you say, just shave a few days off the year, maybe make it a nine-day week (40 weeks per year) and we'd be set!
Our seasons are closer to being heat-based than light-based. If they were light-based, then the solstice (June 23 or thereabouts) would be the middle of summer, not the start. Indeed it’s called Midsummer, suggesting that we used to define the seasons that way, but we have gone with the odd choice that summer starts on midsummer and winter starts on midwinter.
I am all for light-based seasons: start summer on walpurgis night, fall on lammas, winter on halloween, and spring on candlemas. We can do it!!
Ok, i get what you mean about light-based seasons, with spring and summer vs fall and winter. But another way to base seasons on light is to have summer the brightest season, winter the darkest, and spring and fall the in-between ones. That is my plan to start the seasons on the cross-quarter days.
Lovely post Scott. I had not thought of things this way either.
It did rhyme with something else that I did think about a lot: how people confuse stocks and flows. Example, GDP is a flow (production), not a stock as say, wealth, or capital generally. It does matter when you talk about standards of living. For example Europe has clearly lower GDP/capita than the US but subjectively the living standards in Europe seem high, perhaps higher than in the US. I believe this is because Europe has a lot of wealth stock (buildings, landscapes, art, what have you) just standing around being useful. But those are established stocks and the "consumption" of their benefits does not count in GDP.
"Does happiness come from a high level of consumption, or a fast rising level of consumption? ":
I think it clearly does - analogy with the effects of dopamine - people are happiest when they seek, not when they receive, and in terms of receiving, they are happiest when they receive unexpected benefits, not expected ones. Receiving the expected generally feels unremarkable (one of the reasons why happiness with a salary raise disappears after a couple of weeks - the new salary becomes priced into normal life).
Niall Ferguson and right wing intellectuals: I have overall been very disappointed by right wing intellectuals. What passes for thinkers, example Thiel or Yarvin, are not even particularly deep. The best ones, such as Ferguson, remind me eerily of some of the smartest Germans that sided with Hitler "for the good of the country" and clearly had a huge blind spot there. And the broligarchs defy even commenting. It's not just Musk, people like Andreessen just make me angry. Anywhere from wilful abdication of thought to apologetic nonsense in the way of "If only the Fuhrer knew".
Good points. I agree that Europe's living standards are higher than the GDP figures would suggest (this might be even more true of Japan.) But the flow of housing services from residential buildings is counted in GDP.
I'm a bit confused by your seasons analogy. It's very standard in my country to count seasons from the start of the month (i.e Summer starts on December 1). The longest day is December 21 so Summer is unambiguously the season with the longest days.
Do Americans always use the equinoxes/solstices to define the start of seasons?
Have you said much at all about Elon, DOGE, and the odds that it will accomplish meaningfully lower federal spending ten years from now? If not, do you generally find yourself in agreement with cheesehead Jessica Riedl and Noah Smith on DOGE? Below are some links on that topic:
People do define and refer to the seasons based on temperatures. Summer break for public schools in many places in the US starts sometime in June and ends sometime in August, which then naturally leads to September, October, and November being fall (think of fall semester), December, January and February being winter, and March, April and May being spring. A fancy way of saying this is that meteorological seasons start at different times than astronomical seasons.
"But that’s due to the fact that the natural rate of unemployment has been trending downward since the 1980s, so we tend to recover to a lower unemployment rate than where we started.
Prior to the 1980s, however, the natural rate of unemployment was trending upward, and the average unemployment rate during recessions was actually lower than during the subsequent expansion"
I have to ask....why is this Scott? Could the expansion of "disability" after 1980 be a factor....removing people from the workforce such that they no longer count as "unemployed."
It's probably partly that factor, partly the decline of unions, and partly due to fewer young people in the labor force (who tend to have higher rates of unemployment.)
That's probably the main reason, but also because they are richer than in the past. I worked when I was in high school, that's much less common today. Instead of teenagers at McDonalds, you see adults that look like recent immigrants.
Speaking of literature and seasons, I know you are a Knausgaard fan, as am I. Have you read his Season's Quartet, and, if so, what do you think of them? Tyler Cowen didn't like them, but I'm looking for a second opinion on whether they are worth reading.
I have not yet read them, but I plan to. I recently read the first three books in the Morning Star quartet, which were OK but not great. I prefer his book of essays: In the Land of the Cyclops.
I agree about both of those. In the Land of the Cyclops is the most enjoyable book I've read in several years. I've read the first two Morning Star books and will probably eventually read the rest. They are very good in parts when they are good, but boy I sure wish his editor would have cut their size in half. Way too much time is spent without much interesting happening. In My Struggle, all the little boring parts of life are part of the point and allow for the better parts to stand like trees above the grass, but I don't see what point a 30-page description of a soccer practice serves in The Wolves of Eternity. Part of what's so great about Cyclops is it goes straight into some of his most interesting thoughts without the need to tell you every detail about his trip to the grocery that morning.
The Sturm and drang these past few weeks from the vociferously anti-Trumpers is ethico- politically justified. But as a tactical matter this type of reaction hasn't done the Dems any electoral favors.
Perhaps in a more reserved way say we vehemently disagree with Trump’s approach and believe it is fool hardy and dangerous. And sit back and watch Trump fail.
You don't want to get into a fight with a Pig, you'll get muddy and the Pig will love it
Is the dem's tone really the problem? Or is it that the right wing oligarchs fund a multibillion dollar disinformation industry devoted to denigrating liberals and liberalism while glorifying their ugly self-serving "conservatism"?
The left has no counterpart.
I don't think it matters what the left does. Whatever the form their actions take they will be relentlessly attacked and vilified by the right. Right now, people, Dems included, are blaming things like wokeness (whatever ever that Is ) and advocating for trans rights for the position the Dems are in, trump's victory, and how Dems became "uncool" to America's kids. We are told, "It's the "Vibes" man !"
But I'd say if it wasn't "woke" or trans rights the right would have vilified some other aspects of the left. The problem for the left is not finding the right tone, it's that they face an opponent that disregards reality to shape a useful substitute for reality. When your ideological opponent can successfully shape what is seen as real, there is no way to win.
The problem I was addressing was how the Anti-Trumpers could best respond to maximize their chances to minimize his impact on future elections, based on the data.
I also submitted my view that their criticism were "ethico-politically justified". And they were confronting a Pig, and by paraphrasing George Bernard Shaw, counseling them it's a non-winning electoral tactic.
What if the expansion was very uneven, so a lot of people were not experiencing much or any improvement, while something—e.g. a mass surge in immigration—was driving up rents? It is possible to have the macro figures look great while a lot of folk were not noticing much improvement, or even going backwards.
When I think of blame, I think of the best way to fix the problem. If X is the fix for Y, then not doing X is to be blamed for Y. Canada should obviously eliminate NIMBY policies, whereas immigration hugely benefits Canada.
I think the benefits of immigration have been over-stated because various costs have been wildly under-stated. Also, having housing entrants not being voting citizens makes it easier to discount the interests of housing market entrants, so shifting policy towards housing incumbents while also driving up tax receipts due to higher prices from restrictive land use regulation.
To expand on the NIMBY point, NIMBYism—using regulation to block new construction—is a lot easier to generate the more housing market entrants are non-voters (i.e. migrants). Increasing population increases the wish to protect local amenity, such as not blocking views or from other crowding effects. These patterns spiral up the more property dominates household wealth. So, migration not only drives up the value of land, it increases NIMBY pressures, generating surging rents and pushing home ownership out of reach.
In Australia, NIMBYism started in cities with geographical positional goods—Sydney, with its beaches and Harbour views and Adelaide with its Hills—and then spread to other cities as population growth increased the wish to protect amenity and State Governments took advantage of the tax revenue benefits of rising property prices. The notion that migration would not be a problem for rents and house prices if it was not for NIMBYism forgets that importing people affects all aspects of a society, including regulatory pressures.
In an ideal policy world yes. If supply is fully responsive, then immigration has no effect on rents. If, in a situation of severe supply constraints, as Canada has, you engage in a massive surge in immigration, as Canada has, the result is predictable.
Also, I think you wildly over-state the benefits of immigration, which is highly dependent on form and scale, but that is a different argument.
Partly because I couldn’t find the comment of yours I wanted to respond to and because migration issues and pressures are very obviously part of what has been generating national populism.
You didn’t say that immigration was one of several factors contributing to a mismatch between supply and demand - you said there was one factor only, and that it was immigration. I don’t think changes in immigration have had nearly as much effect on housing costs in recent years as changes in work-from-home, changes in household structure, and lack of construction.
If supply is constrained, for whatever reason, in this case mainly regulatory, and you massively increase demand, rents will go up. That was the point I was making.
I wonder if there's an analogy to the relationship between industrial concentration and prices.
> So our seasons are based on light, not heat.
This is how seasons work for trees as well. They sense winter coming and going primarily by how much daylight there is rather than by how cold it gets—daylight varying much more regularly with the seasons than temperature does.
Something about how we think of industrial concentration as increasing prices, but big businesses like Amazon offer lower prices, or even free services like Google. Maybe we can think of concentration as sometimes having a rate effect of making prices go up but a level effect of making prices go down.
Interesting stuff… but isn’t just simply that in a circular path (or unending wave function) we orient ourselves by turning points?
I mean the shortest and longest day of the year are the markers the ancients could notice. The equinox are just the exactly equal day/night 24 hour periods (also noticeable with a sun dial and such).
If the year was 360 days this would be simple. It’s a very divisible number. Magic numbers to the ancients were base 12, 60, and 360… because they have so many factors. If u need to divide things into equal groups, you want to use such numbers… but I digress.
We use these markers because we can observe them… even if only after the fact.
I think it’s about easily noticeable markers.
The ancient celts actually observed the seasons in the way Scott mentions - they marked the divisions between the seasons on the dates halfway between the equinox and solstice, Beltane (May 1) as the beginning of summer, and Samhain (October 31) as the beginning of winter.
Agreed. I took an astronomy class that talked about how the ancients "celebrated" the solstices--often including human sacrifices on the winter solstice, as a means to beg the Sun God to stop retreating and return for summer.
My contention is that if heat did not lag light, and thus the summer/winter solstices were the hottest/coldest day of the year, then the middle of summer would be "Midsummer," i.e. the summer solstice in late June, (and likewise for winter in late December), but because heat does lag light, we have adjusted what we call the seasons to begin on what would be halfway through, otherwise.
And like you say, just shave a few days off the year, maybe make it a nine-day week (40 weeks per year) and we'd be set!
Our seasons are closer to being heat-based than light-based. If they were light-based, then the solstice (June 23 or thereabouts) would be the middle of summer, not the start. Indeed it’s called Midsummer, suggesting that we used to define the seasons that way, but we have gone with the odd choice that summer starts on midsummer and winter starts on midwinter.
I am all for light-based seasons: start summer on walpurgis night, fall on lammas, winter on halloween, and spring on candlemas. We can do it!!
Ok, i get what you mean about light-based seasons, with spring and summer vs fall and winter. But another way to base seasons on light is to have summer the brightest season, winter the darkest, and spring and fall the in-between ones. That is my plan to start the seasons on the cross-quarter days.
Lovely post Scott. I had not thought of things this way either.
It did rhyme with something else that I did think about a lot: how people confuse stocks and flows. Example, GDP is a flow (production), not a stock as say, wealth, or capital generally. It does matter when you talk about standards of living. For example Europe has clearly lower GDP/capita than the US but subjectively the living standards in Europe seem high, perhaps higher than in the US. I believe this is because Europe has a lot of wealth stock (buildings, landscapes, art, what have you) just standing around being useful. But those are established stocks and the "consumption" of their benefits does not count in GDP.
"Does happiness come from a high level of consumption, or a fast rising level of consumption? ":
I think it clearly does - analogy with the effects of dopamine - people are happiest when they seek, not when they receive, and in terms of receiving, they are happiest when they receive unexpected benefits, not expected ones. Receiving the expected generally feels unremarkable (one of the reasons why happiness with a salary raise disappears after a couple of weeks - the new salary becomes priced into normal life).
Niall Ferguson and right wing intellectuals: I have overall been very disappointed by right wing intellectuals. What passes for thinkers, example Thiel or Yarvin, are not even particularly deep. The best ones, such as Ferguson, remind me eerily of some of the smartest Germans that sided with Hitler "for the good of the country" and clearly had a huge blind spot there. And the broligarchs defy even commenting. It's not just Musk, people like Andreessen just make me angry. Anywhere from wilful abdication of thought to apologetic nonsense in the way of "If only the Fuhrer knew".
Good points. I agree that Europe's living standards are higher than the GDP figures would suggest (this might be even more true of Japan.) But the flow of housing services from residential buildings is counted in GDP.
I'm a bit confused by your seasons analogy. It's very standard in my country to count seasons from the start of the month (i.e Summer starts on December 1). The longest day is December 21 so Summer is unambiguously the season with the longest days.
Do Americans always use the equinoxes/solstices to define the start of seasons?
Yes, we use the equinox, but I like your system better. And If Thomas Mann is correct, Europe also uses this system.
Prof. Sumner,
Have you said much at all about Elon, DOGE, and the odds that it will accomplish meaningfully lower federal spending ten years from now? If not, do you generally find yourself in agreement with cheesehead Jessica Riedl and Noah Smith on DOGE? Below are some links on that topic:
https://x.com/JessicaBRiedl/status/1893542943698321491
https://x.com/JessicaBRiedl/status/1893542944969253091
https://manhattan.institute/article/a-comprehensive-federal-budget-plan-to-avert-a-debt-crisis-2024
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/what-i-think-doge-is-really-up-to
Riedl is obviously correct. I'm told that Ramaswamy left DOGE early on because he saw that it would be a scam.
Germany's Friedrich Merz just indicated he's gonna embrace budget deficits!
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/german-defence-boost-no-debt-brake-reform-outgoing-parliament-merz-ally-says-2025-02-25/
Kind of a radical policy shift! Is it gonna work? Commentary from Krugman and Marcus Nunes below:
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/revenge-of-the-black-zero
https://marcusnunes.substack.com/p/germany-and-spain
I think they are making a mistake if they embrace budget deficits, but I do agree that trade deficits are not a problem.
People do define and refer to the seasons based on temperatures. Summer break for public schools in many places in the US starts sometime in June and ends sometime in August, which then naturally leads to September, October, and November being fall (think of fall semester), December, January and February being winter, and March, April and May being spring. A fancy way of saying this is that meteorological seasons start at different times than astronomical seasons.
The link to Niall Ferguson’s response is dead. Does anyone have the link? I’m curious now
I found this:
https://www.thefp.com/p/niall-ferguson-jd-vances-fighting?utm_source=substack&utm_campaign=post_embed&utm_medium=email
"But that’s due to the fact that the natural rate of unemployment has been trending downward since the 1980s, so we tend to recover to a lower unemployment rate than where we started.
Prior to the 1980s, however, the natural rate of unemployment was trending upward, and the average unemployment rate during recessions was actually lower than during the subsequent expansion"
I have to ask....why is this Scott? Could the expansion of "disability" after 1980 be a factor....removing people from the workforce such that they no longer count as "unemployed."
It's probably partly that factor, partly the decline of unions, and partly due to fewer young people in the labor force (who tend to have higher rates of unemployment.)
Interesting. Younger people are less likely to be in the labor force? Because they are in school longer?
That's probably the main reason, but also because they are richer than in the past. I worked when I was in high school, that's much less common today. Instead of teenagers at McDonalds, you see adults that look like recent immigrants.
Makes sense! Thank you for the reply!
Speaking of literature and seasons, I know you are a Knausgaard fan, as am I. Have you read his Season's Quartet, and, if so, what do you think of them? Tyler Cowen didn't like them, but I'm looking for a second opinion on whether they are worth reading.
I have not yet read them, but I plan to. I recently read the first three books in the Morning Star quartet, which were OK but not great. I prefer his book of essays: In the Land of the Cyclops.
I agree about both of those. In the Land of the Cyclops is the most enjoyable book I've read in several years. I've read the first two Morning Star books and will probably eventually read the rest. They are very good in parts when they are good, but boy I sure wish his editor would have cut their size in half. Way too much time is spent without much interesting happening. In My Struggle, all the little boring parts of life are part of the point and allow for the better parts to stand like trees above the grass, but I don't see what point a 30-page description of a soccer practice serves in The Wolves of Eternity. Part of what's so great about Cyclops is it goes straight into some of his most interesting thoughts without the need to tell you every detail about his trip to the grocery that morning.
Good points.
The Sturm and drang these past few weeks from the vociferously anti-Trumpers is ethico- politically justified. But as a tactical matter this type of reaction hasn't done the Dems any electoral favors.
Perhaps in a more reserved way say we vehemently disagree with Trump’s approach and believe it is fool hardy and dangerous. And sit back and watch Trump fail.
You don't want to get into a fight with a Pig, you'll get muddy and the Pig will love it
Is the dem's tone really the problem? Or is it that the right wing oligarchs fund a multibillion dollar disinformation industry devoted to denigrating liberals and liberalism while glorifying their ugly self-serving "conservatism"?
The left has no counterpart.
I don't think it matters what the left does. Whatever the form their actions take they will be relentlessly attacked and vilified by the right. Right now, people, Dems included, are blaming things like wokeness (whatever ever that Is ) and advocating for trans rights for the position the Dems are in, trump's victory, and how Dems became "uncool" to America's kids. We are told, "It's the "Vibes" man !"
But I'd say if it wasn't "woke" or trans rights the right would have vilified some other aspects of the left. The problem for the left is not finding the right tone, it's that they face an opponent that disregards reality to shape a useful substitute for reality. When your ideological opponent can successfully shape what is seen as real, there is no way to win.
The problem I was addressing was how the Anti-Trumpers could best respond to maximize their chances to minimize his impact on future elections, based on the data.
I also submitted my view that their criticism were "ethico-politically justified". And they were confronting a Pig, and by paraphrasing George Bernard Shaw, counseling them it's a non-winning electoral tactic.
My apologies for being obtuse
What if the expansion was very uneven, so a lot of people were not experiencing much or any improvement, while something—e.g. a mass surge in immigration—was driving up rents? It is possible to have the macro figures look great while a lot of folk were not noticing much improvement, or even going backwards.
If rents went up I'd blame NIMBY polices, not immigration.
So the supply effect counts but the demand effect doesn’t? I would blame the interaction myself. This is the popular view in Canada, and elsewhere.
When I think of blame, I think of the best way to fix the problem. If X is the fix for Y, then not doing X is to be blamed for Y. Canada should obviously eliminate NIMBY policies, whereas immigration hugely benefits Canada.
I think the benefits of immigration have been over-stated because various costs have been wildly under-stated. Also, having housing entrants not being voting citizens makes it easier to discount the interests of housing market entrants, so shifting policy towards housing incumbents while also driving up tax receipts due to higher prices from restrictive land use regulation.
https://www.lorenzofromoz.net/p/the-migration-scam
To expand on the NIMBY point, NIMBYism—using regulation to block new construction—is a lot easier to generate the more housing market entrants are non-voters (i.e. migrants). Increasing population increases the wish to protect local amenity, such as not blocking views or from other crowding effects. These patterns spiral up the more property dominates household wealth. So, migration not only drives up the value of land, it increases NIMBY pressures, generating surging rents and pushing home ownership out of reach.
In Australia, NIMBYism started in cities with geographical positional goods—Sydney, with its beaches and Harbour views and Adelaide with its Hills—and then spread to other cities as population growth increased the wish to protect amenity and State Governments took advantage of the tax revenue benefits of rising property prices. The notion that migration would not be a problem for rents and house prices if it was not for NIMBYism forgets that importing people affects all aspects of a society, including regulatory pressures.
Blaming immigrants for NIMBYism is really grasping for straws. Texas is one of the most immigrant intensive parts of the US. I don't buy it.
In an ideal policy world yes. If supply is fully responsive, then immigration has no effect on rents. If, in a situation of severe supply constraints, as Canada has, you engage in a massive surge in immigration, as Canada has, the result is predictable.
Also, I think you wildly over-state the benefits of immigration, which is highly dependent on form and scale, but that is a different argument.
Why are we even discussing immigration? That's not the topic of my post.
Partly because I couldn’t find the comment of yours I wanted to respond to and because migration issues and pressures are very obviously part of what has been generating national populism.
You didn’t say that immigration was one of several factors contributing to a mismatch between supply and demand - you said there was one factor only, and that it was immigration. I don’t think changes in immigration have had nearly as much effect on housing costs in recent years as changes in work-from-home, changes in household structure, and lack of construction.
If supply is constrained, for whatever reason, in this case mainly regulatory, and you massively increase demand, rents will go up. That was the point I was making.
I wonder if there's an analogy to the relationship between industrial concentration and prices.
> So our seasons are based on light, not heat.
This is how seasons work for trees as well. They sense winter coming and going primarily by how much daylight there is rather than by how cold it gets—daylight varying much more regularly with the seasons than temperature does.
Can you be a bit more specific on your first point.
Something about how we think of industrial concentration as increasing prices, but big businesses like Amazon offer lower prices, or even free services like Google. Maybe we can think of concentration as sometimes having a rate effect of making prices go up but a level effect of making prices go down.
I would expect industrial concentration to be associated with high prices, not rising prices.
I tend to agree with both points, except I would not say that happiness has "nothing" to do with consumption, just "little".